Now the Lightning will turn their attention to finalizing their roster. Adding more intrigue into the scenario are the impacts of injuries to Tyler Johnson and the recovering Ryan Callahan, which may allow a few more bubble players like Cory Conacher and/or Alexander Volkov to slip through to opening night. Regardless, it looks like Mathieu Joseph is in after scoring a key tying goal in tonight's encounter as the icing on the cake to his Orlando performance.

Joseph had a goal and was +1 with 3 shots and 1 hit in 15:07.

Danick Martel had a helper and was +1 with 2 shots, 1 hit, and 1 blocked shot in 13:21.

Anthony Cirelli had 2 shots and 2 blocked shots in 15:05 and he was 40% on 15 draws.

Starter Oscar Darnell held off a late rally by Mora J20, which came from three goals down to get the false hope goal in their eventual 5-4 loss. The match was Skelleftea's first regulation win of the season.

Heading into this game I handicapped it as a three horse race to fill the final roster spot in Tampa Bay. Mathieu Joseph may have pulled three lengths ahead tonight. I already thought he had taken a slight lead heading down the stretch, but two goals and a helper in crunch time likely cannot be ignored.

Things looked to be going well with the Lightning up two goals going into the final frame in a game with a lot of front line players from both clubs. It's concerning to cough up that lead and to give up a shorty, especially given that special teams has been a bit of a smoldering disaster thus far in the preseason. Practices will fix that last problem, but you can see some ragged edges as the process moves along to the opener.

Coming into this game, I really felt like this roster was nearly complete with three players fighting for one roster spot with two players fighting for another spot. I believe Adam Erne, who keeps scoring goals, has made the team and that the Lightning are unlikely to carry both Cory Conacher and Danick Martel, who are somewhat similar players in at least a superficial way, on the roster. Given the Lightning had to take the step of claiming Martel off waivers, you'd presume he has a slight edge on the more tenured Conacher. Those two will fight over a single spot, if I'm right the Lightning won't carry both and will try to fish the other through waivers down to Syracuse.

That leaves the final spot on the roster, and I handicap that as a three player race between Erik Cernak, Mathieu Joseph, and Alexander Volkov. If the Lightning decide to carry eight defensemen, Cernak makes the team, period, full stop. A lot of that probably depends on the team's confidence in Sergachev's switch to the right side and their confidence that Slater Koekkoek is finally ready to be more of a contributor to the team (yes, I'm assuming the waiver-eligible Koekkoek will make the club). Most teams don't carry 8 defensemen, but the Lightning have been one of the few teams that regularly have and there is, of course, Jon Cooper's proclivity to dress seven defensemen. Whether he makes the team on opening night or not, expect Cernak to see significant time in Tampa Bay over the course of the season, as he's clearly separated himself as the number eight on the depth chart.

If they go to a more conventional seven defensemen on the roster, though, it comes down to Joseph and Volkov, each of which have the DNA to be contributing complimentary wingers. Joseph's speed and forechecking would be a big plus to the lower lines. Volkov is perhaps a more complete 200 foot player (but only slightly so, Joseph's no slouch) and has a blink-quick release. Either player would be a nice weapon on the roster, but I honestly think the Lightning's style and the overall trend of the league perhaps favors a Joseph promotion.

In my opinion. All speculative, but that seems to me to be the one remaining twist we might see in the final shaping of the roster.

Joseph had a helper and 2 hits in 15:15.

Koekkoek had a shot, a hit, and a blocked shot in 11:59.

Martel had a shot and a blocked shot in 12:23.

Mitchell Stephens had 2 penalty minutes, 2 hits, and 1 blocked shot in 13:02. He was also 44% on 16 draws.

Anthony Cirelli was -1 with 2 shots, 3 hits, and 1 blocked shot in 16:04. He was also 67% on 15 draws.

After a pair of ultra flat games against Carolina to start the preseason, the Lightning youth roared to life tonight in the First Period against a veteran NHL'er-laden Predators lineup to get the 3-0 lead and never look back. Kudos to the Lightning after a performance so bad in Carolina, I didn't write a story about it (actually, a full and complete box score was never published with correct goaltender statistics, so there's that).

Mathieu Joseph was +2 with 2 penalty minutes and 5 shots in 16:49. He's having a pretty good preseason. Knocking on the door.

Slater Koekkoek was +5(!) with 1 hit and 2 blocked shots in 20:10 of duty. Dare we dream this is the year for Slater?

Cameron Gaunce had 3 shots in 21:11.

Boris Katchouk had a goal and was +1 with 2 shots and 2 hits in 14:48. Goals in back to back preseason tilts for Katchouk.

Taylor Raddysh had 1 hit in 16:08.

Kevin Lynch had 1:00 of ice time.

Matthew Spencer had 1 hit in 15:00.

Anthony Cirelli had a helper and was +1 with 2 shots and 1 blocked shot in 19:12 and he was 56% on 18 draws.

Erne had 2 goals and was +2 with 3 shots and 2 hits in 15:31. Annual reminder that Adam Erne has the goods athletically, and just needs to stay healthy.

Dominik Masin had a goal and was +1 with 2 penalty minutes, 3 shots, and 3 blocked shots in 15:43.

Alexander Volkov had a helper and was +2 with 1 hit in 17:18.

Erik Cernak had 2 penalty minutes, 1 shot, and 1 hit in 20:35.

Ross Colton had a helper and was +1 with 2 penalty minutes and 2 shots in 10:18. He was also 38% on 8 draws.

It was the first preseason game, so we should put very little weight on this one. Still, you'd have hoped for a little better with a lot of your top back end players in the lineup, but the team just lacked possession in the preseason opener.

Joseph had a goal and was -1 in 15:17 with 3 shots and 2 hits in 15:17.

Alexei Lipanov had 1 shot and was 30% on 10 draws in 9:34. I kind of expect him to get a copy of the home game and to be returned to junior expeditiously, but we'll see.

Taylor Raddysh had a helper and was -1 in 11:49.

Jonne Tammela had 1 hit in 9:19.

Dominik Masin had 4 penalty minutes and 1 blocked shot in 15:59.

Alexander Volkov had 1 shot and 1 hit in 18:40 in premier minutes with the top liners.

Gabriel Fortier was -1 with 2 penalty minutes and 2 hits in 13:16. I'd expect he also goes the same route back to junior sooner rather than later, although he got a good amount of minutes relative to more established prospects tonight.

Andrei Vasilevskiy allowed 3 goals on 22 shots for the loss. None of the three goals he allowed were soft, but in this moment he's got to make a big situational save on at least one of the Burakovsky breakaways to give his team a chance. This will be an interesting offseason for Andrei, who is renowned for his work ethic. He had an amazing first half, a subpar second half, and an uneven playoffs. It was altogether more good than bad, but I would think he's going to focusing on improving his consistency and some other minor fixes to his game like making sure he stays more upright when he goes down in the butterfly and making sure he consistently pushes out to cut down the angle on shooters.

The simplistic thing to do would be to look at the 4-0 score tonight and say the team didn't show up. I already see some national talking heads doing just that on social media. The fact of the matter is that the Lightning were the victim of the cruel hand of the hockey gods at one of the most inopportune moments imaginable. They outshot the Caps 29-23 and I suspect outchanced them by a greater margin. Did they surrender a goal very early in the game? Sure. But that wasn't because of a flat start. Tip your cap to Ovechkin for being a sniper who can pound that shot off the rush without a ton of room to do so. And then tip your cap to Holtby for being able to hold out wave after wave of Lightning chances, even when Holtby himself had no clue where the puck actually was. The greatest frustration of all came in the Second Period, though, when I thought the team had clearly outplayed the Caps only to see Victor Hedman hit a post and Yanni Gourde whiff in front of a wide open net. A freak play by Dan Girardi having to drop a puck that was shot into his body in the neutral zone leading to one breakaway and then a bad defensive pair change leading to a second, and the game was over after two periods even though the Lightning had carried the balance of play. A three goal deficit is a death sentence in pro hockey after two frames, and especially so against a Barry Trotz coached trapping team. Another simplistic reading would be that the Lightning didn't put up a fight in the Third Period. The fact of the matter is you've got a better chance of slaying a Sasquatch than you do clawing back goals when you're that far behind playing against that trap.

What's the lesson we take from all this? Sometimes hockey's unfair. Just like life. More to the point, though, the Lightning actually no-showed Games One, Two, and Six of this series and had to have Vasilevskiy thieve Game Four for them. When you get to this stage of the season against the quality of teams you face in these moments, you can't spot teams games. A veteran laden team like the Lightning, with all their experience, should've known better. But, they mentally sagged after the triumph of slaying rival Boston in the previous rounds, and then checked out after fighting back to put Washington on the brink. These are painful breakdowns in leadership and mental discipline these players are going to have to live with the rest of their lives.

The Lightning organization now finds itself at a bit of a crossroads. It was the best of times, having been to the Eastern Conference Final or further three of the past four season, but it was also the worst of times having come up dry in the pursuit of a championship. Critical questions need to be asked throughout the building on Channelside, beginning with the question of whether this team is in danger of lapsing into the kind of "elite mediocrity" teams like the Caps and Sharks have been trapped in for what seems like a decade. No one can deny that Tampa Bay is a model franchise built to have more deep playoff runs well into the foreseeable future. But, are they constructed to win championships? Are some of the mainstay players on the roster now tainted with the stench of multiple postseason failures to get all the way over the hump? The coaching staff?

I'm not advocating a complete overhaul by any means. I suspect we will shortly learn that certain players like Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov who seemingly underperformed over the past few weeks have been hiding significant injuries that have to be weighed in the overall evaluation. But, at the end of the day, this Lightning organization is stocked to the gills with good young players in Syracuse and the junior ranks. A strategic and surgical scrambling of the roster to replace some of those crusty, stale mainstays with exciting new blood is a necessity both from a hockey and a financial standpoint. It's coming. It needs to happen. To put it bluntly, the window is closing on a lot of players who have been cornerstones of the past half decade here, and it shut completely on a few others. Harsh but true.

One other thing I want to mention tonight, only because it irks me for its parallels to the 2011 series against Boston. It frustrates me to no end that the referees made a decision over the past two or three games to completely swallow their whistles. Just as in 2011, it's as if they made a conscious decision that because Tampa Bay's power play was so lethal and therefore each power play had an outsized chance of impacting the outcome of the games that they just weren't going to call anything. "Letting the boys decide it," is an act of moral cowardice by the refs, and despite their thinking that they aren't making a choice by electing to swallow their whistles they are, in fact, choosing to disadvantage the team with the better power play. We saw Yanni Gourde get cross checked in the nose in the First Period in a scrum. No call. We saw Washington play with seven skaters on the ice for a while in the First Period. No call. We saw copious quantities of clutching and grabbing throughout this series that reached epidemic proportions in the first 40 minutes of this game. No calls. I'm not going to sit here and tell you the Lightning also didn't commit infractions that could've been called and weren't because of what the refs chose to do. But the fact of the matter is the Lightning outpossessed Washington by huge proportions for wide swaths of the First and Second Periods, most notably the first five minutes of the Second Period, and there's no way in hell Washington didn't commit a penalty in those spaces of time. A team like Tampa Bay is constructed for possession and to accrue the benefits from that possession that come in the form of, among other things, increased power play time. The decision by the refs, which is a gutless calculation designed to proclaim they didn't favor one team over another, favored the team built for clutching and grabbing that is better built for counter attacking (the Caps) over the possession-oriented team (the Lightning). And that's wrong. It was in 2011 and it is still wrong now.

Anthony Cirelli had 1 hit and was 33% on 6 draws in 13:03. He's become a solid, valuable player for this team and he's still a boy among men. He's got a lot to do to develop a pro body and to work on improving his burst and acceleration so he can dig down and find a top gear when he needs it. He's really smart and has a great work ethic, though, and he should be one of the future leaders of this team.

At the end of the day, the Caps were the more desperate team with their backs against the wall and it showed in their physical intensity and resolve. The Lightning now have a choice to make. This team had two cracks at eliminating Pittsburgh two years ago and they couldn't get it done. This time they've got Game Seven at home and they've played two less games than the Capitals have in these playoffs and one would argue it will be hard for the Caps to replicate the level of intensity they displayed in Game Six. To me, it really comes down to whether the Lightning make the decision to dig their heels in, focus on the task, and get it done. They should be the fitter team, and the 82 game slog of the regular season was all to give them this opportunity for the fans to have their backs in a critical elimination. They just have to step up and play their best game on Wednesday and they'll be fine.

Anthony Cirelli was scoreless in 13:30. I wonder if he has some kind of nagging injury or the team is just sheltering him because he's taken very few draws the past couple of games.

Andrei Vasilevskiy allowed 2 goals on 30 shots for the victory. When the time game to make the big situational saves at the end of the game, he was there. You can't help but wonder if 20 years from now we're going to look back at this series as one of the defining mileposts of a special career.

Ryan Callahan, Cedric Paquette, and Vasilevskiy were the game's three stars.

My man, Ceddy P. The Dump Truck. Nineteen seconds into the game he blisters a centering feed past Holtby and the Lightning just turned in the First Period of First Periods from there. The Lightning came to the rink prepared to do what it took to take control of this series from the opening puck drop and they could've easily been up 4-0 in the opening frame and a lot of that had to do with the quality and dominance of the team's third and fourth lines. You're not seeing the sustained pressure from the Stamkos and Point lines, but the Cirelli and Paquette lines have been fantastic. It's pretty amazing to see, less than two weeks away from Boston blowhard Jack Edwards implying Paquette was the worst player in the NHL, Dump Truck and his line actually beating the mighty Ovechkin line. Yeah, Ovechkin got his garbage time goal with the extra attacker on tonight, but he went shotless for what seemed like the first 15 minutes of his 20+ minutes of ice time.

Washington will hang their hat on the fact they clawed back a couple of goals in the final two periods while they were chasing the game with score effects. They'll have a little momentum facing elimination in Game Six, but they'll also have to contend with copious ghosts of playoff disappointments past, too. Meanwhile, the veteran-laden Tampa Bay Lightning are now just a single win from the Stanley Cup Final, and over the past three games they've shown a certain savvy to do just what it takes to get the win and keep it moving. If I'm Coach Cooper, I'm feeling pretty good about that group of guys being within eyesight of the finish line to advance to the Stanley Cup Final. Pretty good, indeed.

Anthony Cirelli had 1 hit and 1 blocked shot in 11:46. He was good on the forecheck tonight, helping the Lightning generate pressure and keeping the Caps 200 feet from Vasilevskiy's net.